Standing roll call of Roma from Burgenland in the Buchenwald concentration camp, autumn 1939. The men had been deported from the Lackenbach detention camp to the Dachau concentration camp and from there to Buchenwald, where they arrived on 27 September 1939. There had been radical persecution of the minority in Burgenland early on. Thousands were murdered in detention camps and concentration camps, but above all in the Litzmannstadt ghetto, the Kulmhof extermination camp and the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp. Of the 11,000 members of the minority who once lived in Austria, around 9,000 were murdered – most of them were Roma from Burgenland.
The photograph was probably taken by the camp’s identification service. The original bears the caption ‘Dachau admissions autumn 1939’.